Above and Below

Your last village was ransacked by barbarians. You barely had time to
pick up the baby and your favorite fishing pole before they started the
burning and pillaging. You wandered over a cruel desert, braved frozen
peaks, and even paddled a log across a rough sea, kicking at the sharks
whenever they got too close, the baby strapped tightly to your back.

Then you found it! The perfect place to make your new home. But as
soon as you had the first hut built, you discovered a vast network of
caverns underground, brimming with shiny treasures, rare resources, and
untold adventure. How could you limit your new village to the surface?
You immediately start organizing expeditions and building houses
underground as well as on the surface.

With any luck, you’ll build a village even stronger than your last–
strong enough, even, to turn away the barbarians the next time they come
knocking.

Above and Below is a mashup of
town-building and storytelling where you and up to three friends compete
to build the best village above and below ground. In the game, you send
your villagers to perform jobs like exploring the cave, harvesting
resources, and constructing houses. Each villager has unique skills and
abilities, and you must decide how to best use them. You have your own
personal village board, and you slide the villagers on this board to
various areas to indicate that they’ve been given jobs to do. Will you
send Hanna along on the expedition to the cave? Or should she instead
spend her time teaching important skills to one of the young villagers?

A great cavern lies below the surface, ready for you to explore–
this is where the storytelling comes in. When you send a group of
villagers to explore the depths, one of your friends reads what happens
to you from a book of paragraphs. You’ll be given a choice of how to
react, and a lot will depend on which villagers you brought on the
expedition, and who you’re willing to sacrifice to succeed. The book of
paragraphs is packed with encounters of amazing adventure, randomly
chosen each time you visit the cavern.

At the end of the game, the player with the most well-developed village wins!